Book club, corn dollies, and a phone fail

On Sunday I hosted a book club party for my friends Marla and Martina. I'd been planning this little get together for months now, and it wasn't anything like I expected, but still fun. 

The book I chose was Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon. It's an American folk horror novel from the early 70s that I stumbled across as a pre-teen in my small town's limited public library. It's appropriately creepy for this time of year. 

In addition to chicken corn chowder, I served a charcuterie board for my friends to enjoy.

I also attempted to bake an apple pie and pumpkin bars with brown sugar icing. Both ended in failure. I got the spices in the pie wrong, and it was all but inedible. As for the pumpkin bars...I meant to double the recipe because of the large can of pumpkin puree I wanted to use up, but I failed to double the amount of baking soda and sugar and what I ended up with was a flat, bland mess. I threw it in the garbage along with the pie and went to the grocery store at the last minute and bought desserts to share instead. Oh, well.

When Marla showed up, she was not happy with her husband. He was out of town helping a friend with something, and he didn't make it back in time to watch their daughter, so Carsen had to come along. Fortunately, I'd had the idea to do a craft related to the book, and Carsen really had a good time participating. We made traditional corn husk dolls! Carsen put googly eyes on hers, and I thought it turned out really cute!

Martina's doll turned out really pretty, with rosebuds and marigold flowers hot-glued on.

I didn't get a separate picture of the doll I made (and couldn't for reasons I'll explain in a minute) but here's the four dolls arranged all together out on the back porch. Mine is on the far right.

And here's mine and Martina's after Marla and Carsen had left.

Right after I took these photos, I accidently dropped my phone into the container pond on the back porch. Arrrgggh!!!!!!!!!!! I also dropped a massive F-bomb in front of Carsen when I did it. 

I snatched the phone out of the water, and for a while everything seemed to work normally, which is how I got these photos saved, but by the next morning my phone was dead. No amount of rice is working, either. That's everyone's first suggestion, to cover it in rice to absorb the moisture, but it's been no good. I have to get a new phone. Luckily, I'm on fall break this week and I plan to take care of that tomorrow. It's really weird to be without a phone, though, even if it's just for a few days. On the bright side, my phone was really old and getting glitchy, so I guess this is a perfect excuse to upgrade. 

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So that's how my fall break is going!